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The Tamil letters thereafter evolved towards a more rounded form and by the 5th or 6th century, they had reached a form called the early vaṭṭeḻuttu. [10] The modern Tamil script does not, however, descend from that script. [11]
In Tamil, a single letter standing alone or multiple letters combined form a word. Tamil is an agglutinative language – words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes .
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of "true-subapical" retroflex consonants and multiple rhotic consonants.Its script does not distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word, voiced intervocalically and after nasals except when geminated. [1]
Tamil has three simple tenses—past, present, and future—indicated by the suffixes, as well as a series of perfects indicated by compound suffixes. Mood is implicit in Tamil, and is normally reflected by the same morphemes which mark tense categories. Tamil verbs also mark evidentiality, through the addition of the hearsay clitic ām. [108]
There are clear rules as to what letters can and can not come as the first letter of a word used in Tamil, how long (the duration) each Tamil letter is to be pronounced and when they get shortened by half or by one quarter etc. Native speaker with a basic grounding in the language know these without elaborate rules.
Tamil has a numeric prefix for each number from 1 to 9, which can be added to the words for the powers of ten (ten, hundred, thousand, etc.) to form multiples of them. For instance, the word for fifty, ஐம்பது ( aimpatu ) is a combination of ஐ ( ai , the prefix for five) and பத்து ( pattu , which is ten).
Vatteluttu probably started developing from Tamil-Brahmi from around the 4th or 5th century AD. [2] [9] [10] The earliest forms of the script have been traced to memorial stone inscriptions from the 4th century AD. [2] It is distinctly attested in a number of inscriptions in Tamil Nadu from the 6th century AD. [4]
Tamil All Character Encoding (TACE16) is a scheme for encoding the Tamil script in the Private Use Area of Unicode, implementing a syllabary-based character model differing from the modified-ISCII model used by Unicode's existing Tamil implementation.